I love worldbuilding. Most of the things I write about and think about and read about tends to involve it in some fashion – from little oddities, like an Earth that’s exactly the same as ours except for the occasional angel or zombie or android or what-have-you, to the sprawling high-fantasy landscapes of alien worlds … Continue reading Worldbuilding with Ben Pearce
Breaking the Bankers Part 2: LIBOR
[Transcript follows] When people angrily shout about the finance industry; “It’s not real! They’re just moving numbers around on paper!” Probably the best example that comes to mind is the derivatives market. Warren Buffet famously called them “a financial weapon of mass destruction”, and a bunch of angry autistic men in suits use them to … Continue reading Breaking the Bankers Part 2: LIBOR
Breaking the Bankers: Part 1 – Private Equity
The first of a three part series looking into what is and isn't legal, or at least enforcable, in world finance. With podcasting.
Winning Hearts and Minds: The Pentagon and Hollywood
The best propaganda is that which, as it were, works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge of the propagandistic initiative. ~ Goebbels
Napoleonic Era Warfare
Warfare is the culmination of a society’s engineering and social technologies in a way that is hard to find elsewhere. You can see a nation’s priorities emerge, too, because progress doesn’t happen in a straight line. Sometimes it even regresses.
Fred Hampton
In 1969, a young black man was assassinated by the FBI for the crime of providing breakfast to poor inner-city children. This is that story.
An Article I Hope I Don’t Come to Regret
A look into why discrimination against black people and poor people blur together at the seams, and just how badly being low-income affects development.
On Britain
When I say Britain is insidiously succumbing to internal problems, what do I mean by that, what can I point to as examples, and what can we learn from it? Surprisingly, I don't even mention Brexit.
That one time the CIA overthrew the Australian government and there was a fascist police state in Queensland
The amazing thing is that title isn't hyperbolic.
Annihilation and the Nature of Pretentious Media
There is a specific danger of pretension, of appearing ‘smarter’ than the ideas in your media actually deliver. Annihilation, I find, is guilty of this. The danger is that when your meaning isn’t clear, when your story isn’t well delivered, the criticism doesn’t get directed at the work; It makes your audience feel like they simply weren’t smart enough to understand it, that it went above their head. I compare it to Full Metal Jacket and children's animation. The animation is actually Zootopia, but I wanted an excuse to use this as the cover image.
